Speaker
Luis Ernesto Vela Vela
Description
See the full Abstract at http://ocs.ciemat.es/EPS2018ABS/pdf/P4.1050.pdf
Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and its application to the solution of
fusion-relevant MHD problems
L.Vela Vela1 , R. Sanchez1 , J.M.Reynolds-Barredo1 , J.Geiger2
1 Universidad Carlos III, Leganes, Spain
2 Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Greifswald, Germany
The present contribution aims at demonstrating the potential advantages of simulating MHD
scenarios typically considered among the magnetically-confined-plasma community using SPH.
The SPH method, or Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, is a Lagrangian numerical method
originally designed to solve the equations of Hydrodynamics and later extended to Magnetohy-
drodynamics [1].
In SPH every particle corresponds not only to a
small portion of the fluid but also serves as an in-
terpolation node for its neighbours. Using this in-
terpolation procedure one can discretise the spatial
derivatives of ideal/resistive MHD on a co-moving
frame and obtain evolution equations for the par-
ticle’s position, velocity, mass density and internal
energy. In contrast to PIC codes, the magnetic field
in SPH is not solved with an underlying regular grid
but is evolved with all the other plasma properties.
This makes SPH completely mesh-free and opens
Figure 1: Simulation of an unstable Z-pinch.
up the possibility of an efficient parallel implemen-
The m=0 (kink) mode, shown here, is the most
tation.
unstable mode of the system.
The contribution presents first a series of numer-
ical tests where the properties of the SPH method are explored (Energy Conservation, Dissi-
pation, Symplectic Integrators, Interpolation Kernels, etc) and second, a battery of realistic 3D
cylindrical plasma columns (Theta pinch, Zeta pinch and Screw pinches) where the accuracy
of the method is quantitatively tested, its solutions benchmarked against known MHD stability
solutions and its suitability for future toroidal applications demonstrated.
References
[1] J.D.Price, "Smoothed particle hydrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics", Journal of Computational Physics,
231, 759-794, (2012)
